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The World; Getting Tough Gets Tough for Australia

FOR more than two decades, Australia has been trying to promote itself as part of Asia. Now, in East Timor, it has found out how unnerving that concept can be when put to the test.

Having led the charge to intervene and having taken command of the international peace keeping force in East Timor, this easy-going, underpopulated, high-living country is having to ponder the cost. Three questions seem to be on everyone's mind:

How can Australia intervene in East Timor, even with the reluctant acquiescence of the Indonesian Government, and still maintain friendly relations with Indonesia, its closest Asian neighbor?

How much can Australia still depend on the United States, its big brother ally of the last 50 years, having seen Washington send only a token force to help out in East Timor?

And now that Washington has deputized it to do the neighborhood policing job, does Australia have the political and financial wherewithal to follow through on its own?

Sure, Australia sent soldiers to the battlefields of World War II, to Korea and Vietnam and lately to the Persian Gulf war. But those soldiers were dispatched with alacrity, with everyone understanding that the post-1945 commitments were an investment in an alliance that the United States was leading. This time, Australia is carrying the big burden.

Since the early 1970's, when Australia lifted a so-called White Australia policy that had strictly limited Asian immigration, successive Governments have tried to position Australia to be with Asia rather than against it, if always under the umbrella of American security.

In particular, Australia cozied up to Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous nation and its closest neighbor. In 1975, it ignored the East Timor independence movement and instead endorsed the Indonesian takeover of the territory after the Portuguese colonial government left. That made Australia the only country to formally recognize the invasion, although the United States, which also favored Indonesia's anti-Communist Government, did not object.

Then, with the idea of building its own strategic solidarity with Indonesia, the Australian Government went on to help train the Indonesian Army, including -- to its current embarrassment -- some of its feared security forces. In 1995, Australia thought it was cementing its ties by signing a defense treaty with Jakarta.

BUT there was a problem with the East Timor policy all along, and it became apparent as complaints of Indonesian brutality there persisted. Australians, who tend to sympathize with underdogs anyway, have long had a special sympathy for the East Timorese, who in World War II helped Australian soldiers trapped in Timor's mountains during the fight against the Japanese. Moreover, the East Timorese, most of whom are Roman Catholic, have forged strong bonds with the Catholic Church in Australia.

So after Indonesia's longtime dictator, Suharto, was forced from office by popular upheaval last year, Australia's conservative Prime Minister, John Howard, wrote to the new Indonesian leader, B. J. Habibie, and suggested that Indonesia sponsor a referendum for East Timor's autonomy.

The Howard Government was surprised when Mr. Habibie went a step further and decided to hold a referendum for independence, which many in the West, including the Australian Defense Ministry, believed would lead to bloodshed.

But the Australians and the United States held their breaths and hoped for the best, even when the Indonesians refused to accept a peacekeeping force in East Timor during the preparations for the ballot.

Then, after the referendum produced a landslide for independence, the Australian Government was taken aback by the killings of civilians and the scorched earth tactics of the Indonesian Army and militias.

But when the Australians decided to get tough, they were also taken aback by Washington.

Mr. Howard said Australia could not stand by as East Timor burned, and he said American troops should operate alongside Australians in East Timor. What he heard in response was sobering. ''If you thought the Pentagon was not keen to go to Kosovo, you should have seen their reaction to going to East Timor,'' said one Australian official.

The American national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, went so far as to point out publicly that the United States had fought in Kosovo because it was in Europe ''I think we have to recognize that Indonesia is in Asia,'' he said. So Washington has committed just 200 troops for the operation, most of them for logistics, and only 100 for East Timor itself. It was hardly the commitment Australia had in mind.

An optimist might find a good side to this. Australia won points in Washington because it was setting a precedent that was comfortable for the Americans: It was leading a regional peacekeeping force, sent in harmony with American policy, that did not require the use of American muscle itself. That contrasts with the reluctance of Britain and France to commit troops to Balkan peacekeeping operations unless Americans were alongside on the ground.

''Unlike the Europeans, who were reluctant to go into Kosovo, the Australians showed themselves to be adults and to take part in adult supervision,'' said Douglas Paal, a member of the Bush Administration's National Security Council who now heads the Asia Pacific Policy Center, a Washington research institute. ''The Australians were not waiting for Uncle Sam. That's the kind of alliance partners we want.''

FROM the Australian point of view, such praise was small consolation, and the slow and small response of the United States felt more like a coming-of-age lesson. After World War II, Australians turned away from Britain and toward the United States as their new natural ally in the Pacific. Washington put defense and intelligence installations in Australia and the two countries exchanged sensitive information freely. The conventional wisdom here was that similar values of democracy, free enterprise and a sunny optimism bonded the Australians and the Americans.

Actually, they do. But now Australians have been told, in effect, that the bond is not a free one. With defense spending at the equivalent of less than $10 billion -- only 1.8 percent of the gross domestic product -- the commitment to East Timor of 2,000 soldiers -- to rise to 4,500 in coming weeks --- is more than the current military budget can bear, Australia's preeminent defense analyst, Paul Dibbs, said. Last week, Australia started to call up reservists.

But the biggest cost of the East Timor commitment for Australia will likely be its long-fostered relationship with Indonesia. It is now in tatters. During the recent crisis, Mr. Habibie refused to take a telephone call from Mr. Howard and last week the Indonesian Government scrapped the defense treaty. Australian businesses have become targets for vandals in Indonesia.

As for the relationship with Washington, the ties will no doubt endure, but not with the same open-hearted enthusiasm from Down Under. Max Walsh, the editor in chief of The Bulletin, a weekly news magazine in Australia, wrote last week: ''Timor has changed our world.''